China Review International

O'Dwyer's long-awaited, brilliant socioeconomic analysis of the importance of the Kwantung Leasehold to Japanese settler politics, and later, to Japan's 1931 takeover of Manchuria, gives a classical empirical historical study in the vein of the departed historian Mark Elliott that is both readable, clear, and entertaining, while seasoned with gossipy gems reminiscent of the political scandals of the time. She situates her work in the field as teikoku-shi ["imperial history"], which "considers the broad imperial sphere in which interactions between metropole and colony, as well as interactions among individual colonial spaces are essential to understanding the political dynamics situated in each place" (p. 5). Such an approach is far from new, of course, in terms of the works of scholars such as Anne Stoler, Mary Louise Pratt, and others published in the last two decades, but in Japanese studies, cultural historians such as myself,¹ literary scholars, and art historians have favored such an approach for the past ten years. Political and economic works have unfortunately lagged behind, possibly due to their heavy use of statistical analysis, occasionally politically sensitive information, and extensive time necessary in multinational government archives located in Japan, China, and the United States.

In a study beginning with the arrival of a Japanese colonial apparatus after imperial Japan's pyrrhic 1905 victory in the Russo-Japanese War but focusing on the key years of the 1920s and early 1930s, the author makes a strong argument for the Japanese use of municipal civic institutions to maintain their hold in the empire, countering Chinese nationalist sentiments to maintain leasehold longevity. Instead of focusing on the aftermath of the 1931 Manchurian Incident engineered by the Kwantung Army as a means of establishing de facto Japanese control over northeast China, she sees the political Japanization of the Kwantung Lease Territory proceeding squarely through the expansion of civil society (p. 159) until the early 1920s, and, later, maintaining Japanese interests in Manchuria by popular demand. Indeed, the Kwantung Army was not subsumed into the Imperial Army as a separate garrison until 1919 (p. 140), and it was, in part, Japanese settlers themselves who began to clamor for a military solution by the late 1920s, though they chafed when the Kwantung Army asserted themselves too strongly after 1931. Interestingly, the Leasehold remained a Japanese colony after 1931, while the rest of Manchuria became nominally independent Manchukuo under Japanese auspices in 1932.

In terms of the rise of a municipal political consciousness with imperial ramifications among Japanese emigrants, the Dairen Municipal Council and the [End Page 222] Mantetsu Employees Association (MEA) were important precursors of settler organization. The Municipal Council represented business interests among both Japanese and Chinese, while the MEA supported the needs of South Manchurian Railways Company staff—later expanding to represent Japanese employees ranked at all levels. The city's bourgeoisie felt a strong desire for democratization as an aspect of political modernization (p. 166). Moreover, the internationally accepted Washington System ushered in a time of "peaceful internationalism" tempering blatant imperialist takeovers of land and territory following the First World War.

O'Dwyer points to the significance of the usually neglected transitional 1920s as a key period in articulating settler colonialist demands for inclusion into the metropole. Her contribution comes from highlighting how the emergence of a civic sphere in the Leasehold centered in Dairen contributed immensely to later iterations of Japanese sovereignty in the region, through the emergence of a civic consciousness and political efficacy linking it politically to the metropole, thus highlighting its importance as "significant soil" and Dairen as "a city like no other" (p. 23).² O'Dwyer dates this "new imperial populism" to 1928 (p. 213), where the "protection and maintenance of continental empire was the urgent duty of the kokumin" (p. 214). Isolating 1928 as the birth of a mass politics among...